Nintendo reveals why you don’t actually fight Bowser in Super Mario Bros. 1
Posted on October 25, 2026 by Brian(<a href="https://www.twitter.com/NE_Brian" rel="nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>@NE_Brian)
in General Nintendo, News
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto has shared some insight into why players don’t actually fight Bowser in the original Super Mario Bros.
Miyamoto was present at a press conference at the end of the week to celebrate him becoming the first developer to win Japan’s Order of Culture award. During the event, he was asked to share behind-the-scenes stories about the making of Super Mario Bros.
You do go head-to-head with Bowser in Super Mario Bros., but not so much directly. Most players will typically defeat him by going straight for the end of the bridge and hitting the axe, which causes Bowser to fall into lava. The only other option you have is becoming Fire Mario and slamming him with fireballs.
According to Miyamoto, the team was struggling with creating a battle with Bowser. That makes sense as games were in their early days and the hardware capabilities of the NES were very limited.
Miyamoto then thought about how Super Mario Bros. is about running to the right. That led him to come up with the idea of jumping over Bowser rather than fighting him. After trying it out during development, “it turned out to be surprisingly fun.”
Miyamoto shared the following:
“… I thought about which behind-the-scenes story would be most fitting for Super Mario, but this time let’s talk about the game system.
For example, there used to be a game called Pac-Man . You eat all the dots in the maze, and when they’re all gone, you win. Anyone can see that. Tetris is similar; you place the pieces that fall from above, and when you get a line, they disappear. Anyone can see that too.
However, there was something a little difficult about the game I created , Donkey Kong. It wasn’t something that ‘everyone could easily understand’ that this person was going from point A to point B.
There wasn’t anything that made everything look nice once you cleared it, or something that made everything okay once you fulfilled all the requirements, so it was quite a struggle. To make it clear that ‘you have to go from here to here,’ I made the game so that a gorilla runs away, kidnaps a girl, and you have to go and rescue her .
Back then, I used to think, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the screen could scroll indefinitely so I could go even further?’ But that was difficult with the technology at the time. That’s one of the reasons why the initial idea was, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could make a game where Mario can jump and run endlessly?’
As we brainstormed various ideas, we considered things like whether or not to include a system where if you eat a mushroom and grow bigger, you’ll be okay even if you get defeated once, and that’s how it became Super Mario.
At that time, I thought, ‘If people can run, then they can run on land, swim in the sea, and fly in the sky—what if everything you want to do could be done through action?’ I called this ‘land, sea, and air.’ I think that was probably my ‘invention.’
I’m sure everyone wanted to run sideways, fly through the air, swim, and do that. When we were kids, we’d look out the window, point, and imagine people running, flying, falling into rivers… and so on. In Super Mario, you can actually do that. And when you try it, you’re left with a sense of that world.
And the biggest invention, or rather, the most intriguing aspect of Super Mario, is that Mario doesn’t actually fight Bowser. Normally, if there’s a boss at the end, you have to fight him, right? But creating a battle is difficult, and we were really struggling with how to do it.
When I thought, ‘I can’t create a battle like this,’ I realized that since it’s a game where you keep running to the right, how about making it so that the person who reaches the far right wins? Then I had a brilliant idea: ‘Why not just jump over the opponent instead of fighting?’
All you have to do is jump over Bowser, and he’ll fall. I found it surprisingly fun when I tried it, and I was really happy when I realized that.
I had been racking my brain trying to figure out what to do, but then I thought, ‘Maybe this invention will solve the problem,’ and when I tried it, it turned out to be surprisingly fun. That’s the backstory of Super Mario. So, as we made the second and third games, Mario gradually started to have proper battles with Bowser.”
Miyamoto also previously detailed the origins of the dash mechanic in Super Mario Bros.
